“Farmacology” by Daphne Miller, M.D. urges an innovative food based approach to solving current health problems.
“Farmacology”, written by Daphne Miller, M.D. and published by William Morrow(an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers), is a very innovative, thought provoking and past-due book by a member of the medical profession. Well researched and thorough, “Farmacology” explores human health in the context of the foods we eat, where those foods come from and how those foods are produced. This book by Daphne Miller convincingly makes the case for a food supply based on local, sustainable farms with healthy soils that are part of the larger ecosystem.
The story is woven together from a series of vignettes, each a snapshot of a different type of sustainable food production located in different areas of the country or of a different patient with vague but all-too-common health problems. Each type of farming approach is correlated with a new way of looking at an existing medical issue. The core tenet of “Farmacology” is that modern medicine needs to learn how to learn from natural ecosystems in order to start addressing the underlying causes of many chronic “modern” diseases rather than relying on drugs and surgery to fix only the symptoms.
The first vignette is a bio-dynamic vegetable farm. It is a story about how living, healthy soil produces more vegetables that are more nutritious and more resistant to pests than sterile, overworked soil that must be constantly supplemented with chemical fertilizers and additions of minerals. The point is also made that this kind of farming quickly becomes a self-sustaining, low energy consumption and non-polluting operation that is a boon for the local area’s economy and health. The similarity is drawn between the healthy community of bacteria, fungi, worms and insects living in good soil and the healthy community of “bugs” living in and on healthy humans.
Sustainable beef, dairy and poultry production are discussed next. Points include the importance of letting the animals eat a diet that is “natural” for them. This means fresh or dried grass and other pasture plants for cattle and grass, leaves, insects, worms and lizards for chickens. Using a system of intensive rotational grazing results in meat, dairy, eggs and poultry that is much healthier for human consumption and does not damage the land. Here, raising healthy calves and chicks is compared to raising healthy children, the common thread being regular exposure to those healthy microbes living in the soil and on the plants and animals. The lesson: you can’t eliminate bad microbes but you can make sure they are outnumbered by the good and so unable to cause health problems.
Next stop is a winery using no chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides. Again, compost produced from on-site waste goes back into the soil, good plants are allowed to out-compete undesirable species and good insects control the damage causing pests. In this case cancer is the correlate. Since there seems to be no cure for cancer once it is established in our bodies and surgically removing it does not prevent recurrence, can we simply hold it at bay by eating foods with the nutrients that keep us healthy and keep cancer from growing and spreading?
Another vignette in “Farmacology” is a series of community urban vegetable gardens in Brooklyn, NY. These farms seem to have solved health problems for the neighborhoods surrounding them that new supermarkets and visiting nurses could not solve. In this case it seems that just having some connection to the land and understanding where the food comes from and how it is grown can mitigate many health and social issues. This idea is then widened to include people everywhere who garden at home, whether they grow food or only flowers.
It is refreshing and encouraging to have a medical doctor tackle the issues addressed in “Farmacology” with such an enlightened approach. I think it is clear that the current prescription of mainstream American medicine for health issues such as obesity, diabetes, allergies, asthma, high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer have not only stalled but are losing ground. A new approach is needed to make headway against these diseases that fixes the underlying causes rather than continue to only treat the symptoms as they occur. Because right now, even though we are living longer, we are losing the race with these chronic diseases. Daphne Miller is on the right track with her new book “Farmacology” and I hope there are a lot of medical professionals in positions of influence reading it.